The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh: Book One: Finding the Killer

By Arthur Jay Harris

The Adam Walsh story you know: After 6-year-old Adam was found murdered, his father, John Walsh, channeled his unbearable grief into becoming an angry crime-fighting TV host.

Yet this is the story you don’t know: For decades, officials had never revealed the file proving the child was Adam. Astonishingly, it showed that the dead child had never been legally ID’d as him. Why? Was it because the evidence was either inconclusive—or showed that the child likely actually wasn’t Adam?

INVESTIGATIVE TRUE CRIME: Never intended to be publicly seen, the key to Adam Walsh’s murder mystery was hidden in an autopsy file 40 years ago. The key wasn’t what was in it; it’s what wasn’t in it. Possibly only one man, maybe two, had seemed to know that—not even the detectives because it meant that decades of their work had not only been wrong and wasted, but couldn’t possibly have been right. On the moment of its discovery by a reporter, the prevailing narrative of the case was about to be shattered.

And that was the least of it.

A famous old crime. No linking physical evidence. For decades, the murder of Adam Walsh, the iconic face of Missing Children, the boy on the milk carton, was an unsolved mystery. Suddenly police declared a solution resurrected on a theory of theirs they’d long discredited. At a live nationally-televised police press conference, the victim’s family was tearful and grateful.

The national media bought it. The local press, however, recognized it as a convenient fiction.

On July 30, 2021, days after the 40th anniversary of Adam’s disappearance, Fred Grimm wrote in the South Florida Sun Sentinel:

“A sensational alternate theory blamed serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who was living in Miami in 1981. But in 2008, despite no new evidence, Hollywood police hung the crime on long-dead Ottis Toole.
“The only mystery left unsolved was how any cop could have possibly believed Ottis Toole.”

While Toole was still alive and in state custody, and could have been charged with Adam’s murder on the same information, John Walsh had belittled the idea:
“A lot of people still think Ottis Elwood Toole did it. But he and [his partner] Henry Lee Lucas confessed to a lot of murders they didn’t do. It’s a great ploy for convicts: They read about a murder and they’re in solitary. They call the police, desperate to clear a murder, and they say, ‘Fly me there and buy me a pizza,’ and they get out of their cells for two days!”
—South Florida magazine, July 1992

Police had statements from six separate witnesses at the mall who said they saw Dahmer when Adam disappeared, but police couldn’t confirm that Dahmer had been in town then. Then reporter Art Harris, working with ABC Primetime, found a Miami police report with Dahmer’s name dated 20 days before Adam was taken. Still they weren’t interested. But by 2008, both Dahmer and Toole were dead, so did it matter? Although the police’s conclusion was eye-rolling, it seemed harmless.

Grimm was wrong only in that police’s belief in Toole was the only mystery left.

Probably without realizing it, by closing the case police unlatched a door locked nearly 30 years before to a guarded secret.
Inside Harris discovered a much larger convenient fiction, but this one not at all harmless. In looking back it explained everything irregular in the investigation that had followed. As long as the secret was kept, the case could never be truly solved. Harris was then working with The Miami Herald, but even when they confronted them, the chief medical examiner who’d hidden it, the police—and most surprisingly, even the Walshes all turned blind eyes.

What was the never-meant-to-be-seen or spoken-of truth in Adam Walsh’s murder?

It starts with, there was an autopsy but no one wrote an autopsy report. That never happens...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arthur Jay Harris
• Release date: Mar 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476369839

Arthur Jay Harris

A feature film, SPEED KILLS, based on my book, opened in November 2018! You can stream it.Watch the trailer:https://www.screendaily.com/news/first-look-trailer-john-travolta-in-speedboat-drama-speed-kills-exclusive/5129868.articleTrue crime writers primarily pursue the question "Why?" Why did somebody commit the crime? How could he get away with it for so long?In my true crime books, I pursue a different primary question: about the case's outcome, I ask, "Are you sure?"Every true crime story has loose ends that naggingly just don't fit into the constructed narrative. They make for a challenge: stay with your narrative and ignore or play them down, or follow them and risk your narrative.There is an essential messiness to true crime that a reader of it must both resist and embrace. But that's why we read it, right? If you want everything well-tied up at the end, read crime fiction. To start, give up on the idea that a story must have a bottom. How can there not be a bottom? Yes, theoretically there is a bottom, but to us on the outside looking in, it's just not accessible. In reality, what we think are story bottoms are really false bottoms; beneath them, if we dare to look, are more bottoms. That wisdom, I should add, did not come to me easily. My stories are always less about the crimes themselves than my endurance to stay on the rollercoaster rides to find the truth. Countless times I'm upended, and I never see it coming.Yet the job of a guide, narrator and investigator, such as myself, remains to organize that mess. However, I also scrutinize the work of the other guides, narrators, and investigators on the story. When I approach a story, I look for, then follow, significant pathways not taken: people who law enforcement couldn't get or weren't then ready to talk; witnesses who weren't asked everything important; and things the authorities were blind to or simply missed.Then there are the stories in which the official investigators suppressed facts. On those, I am unrelenting in pursuing public records (always politely, politeness is essential in all information gathering). In obscure files and from additional reporting based on them, I've discovered a few rare things that were never known outside of law enforcement.Always remember that to some extent, every interested party in a crime story is intentionally misleading us. They tell mostly true things but withhold or lie about other facts that are contrary to their interests. Trust only the people with no skin in the game not to intentionally mislead.In each of my books, I first bring you up to speed by composing the story from what's on the record, then I make a narrative switch to first person and have you follow my investigation. When I pick up the right trail, it becomes obvious. I always advance my stories, including Speed Kills and Until Proven Innocent, but the two books in which I made the most significant (and contrarian) contributions are Jeffrey Dahmer's Dirty Secret: The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh, and Flowers for Mrs. Luskin.And now, because it seems obligatory in such biographical summaries, among the television shows I have appeared on with my stories include: ABC Primetime; Anderson Cooper 360; Nancy Grace; Ashleigh Banfield; The Lineup; Inside Edition; Catherine Crier; Snapped; City Confidential; Cold Blood; and Prison Diaries.

Book preview

JEFFREY DAHMER’S DIRTY SECRET:

THE UNSOLVED MURDER OF ADAM WALSH

BOOK ONE: FINDING THE KILLER

Was the man in the mall

the most notorious murderer in history?

BY ARTHUR JAY HARRIS

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Copyright, 2018, by Arthur Jay Harris

JEFFREY DAHMER’S DIRTY SECRET:

THE UNSOLVED MURDER OF ADAM WALSH

IS A TWO BOOK SERIES

BOOK TWO: FINDING THE VICTIM

The body identified as Adam Walsh was most likely misidentified.

Could Adam still be alive?

FOR BRIEFER READING, THE TWO BOOKS

HAVE BEEN CONDENSED INTO A

SPECIAL SINGLE EDITION

First the police found the body. Then the killer. Neither was right.

JEFFREY DAHMER’S DIRTY SECRET: THE UNSOLVED MURDER OF ADAM WALSH is a journalistic account of the abduction and reported murder of Adam Walsh in Hollywood, Florida in 1981. The events recounted in this book are true. Names that have been changed are noted in the text as such. Research has been done using author interviews, law enforcement and other public records, published and broadcast news stories, and books. Quoted sworn testimony has been taken verbatim from transcripts.

Copyright 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2018 by Arthur Jay Harris

Published by arrangement with the author.

All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information, please email the author at http://www.arthurjayharris.com

Cover and author photos: Sandy Levy, Miami, Fla. http://www.levyphoto.com

Cover and typographical design: Bruce Kluger, New York.

http://www.brucekluger.com

Photographic usage of Hollywood Sun-Tattler newspapers courtesy Hollywood Historical Society, Hollywood, Fla.

Mug shot of Jeffrey Dahmer, courtesy Milwaukee Police Department.

Baseball photo of Adam Walsh, courtesy Hollywood Historical Society. Credit: Gerlinde Photography/Michael Hopkins

Photographs, updates, links and additional materials available at: http://www.arthurjayharris.com.

Or contact the author at Facebook: Jeffrey Dahmer's Dirty Secret: The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh

First print edition: August 2009

First electronic book edition: March 2011

Second edition: June 2013

Third edition: January 2015

Fourth edition: February 2018

Also available in print edition

Other true crime books by

ARTHUR JAY HARRIS

SPEED KILLS

Who killed the Cigarette boat king, Don Aronow, the fastest man on the seas?

FLOWERS FOR MRS. LUSKIN

Who ordered the deadly delivery for the millionaire’s wife?

UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT

Could the real-life Kojak help save a man from the electric chair?

ALL OF THE BOOKS ABOVE

ARE ALSO AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITIONS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1: THE FLEDGLING SERIAL KILLER

CHAPTER 2: THE DISAPPEARANCE

CHAPTER 3: THE BILLY GOATS GRUFF

CHAPTER 4: THE DISCOVERY

CHAPTER 5: MAN IN A BLUE VAN

CHAPTER 6: DAHMER ON A RAMPAGE

CHAPTER 7: THE DRIFTERS

CHAPTER 8: THE DRIFTER’S STORY DRIFTS

CHAPTER 9: THE DRIFTER RECANTS

CHAPTER 10: HE’S STILL OUT THERE

CHAPTER 11: COLD CASE

CHAPTER 12: THE CASE FILE OPENS

CHAPTER 13: FIRST PERSON

CHAPTER 14: JOHN WALSH’S RAGE

CHAPTER 15: TRACKING DOWN A FLEDGLING SERIAL KILLER

CHAPTER 16: THE BLUE VAN

CHAPTER 17: CALLING THE COPS

CHAPTER 18: 25TH ANNIVERSARY

CHAPTER 19: WAS WILLIS MORGAN RIGHT?

CHAPTER 20: THE DAHMER STORY BREAKS

CHAPTER 21: RESOLUTION

DAHMER’S SLIP OF THE TONGUE?

IN THE SUMMER OF 2002, in the true crime section of a used bookstore, I found a 1997 book by former FBI serial-killer profiler Robert Ressler titled I Have Lived in the Monster that included a transcript of an interview he’d conducted with Jeffrey Dahmer in January 1992. Browsing it, Dahmer was talking about finding his last Milwaukee murder victim and had made light of a coincidence, that Konerak Sinthasomphone was the younger brother of Somsack Sinthasomphone, who he’d been arrested for sexually assaulting three years earlier:

He was the brother of the one that [I’d photographed]. I was just walking in the mall, ran into him, didn’t know him from Adam—how many are the chances of that happening? Astronomical.

When I read this, I stared at it. Was this a slip of the tongue by a serial killer who severed heads, who’d admitted being in Miami when the Walsh child was reported lost—and who trolled for children to abduct in a shopping mall?

Didn’t know him from Adam?

In 1991, Hollywood police seemed to have decided that Dahmer’s movements here would be too difficult to trace 10 years after the fact. Despite the handicap of another 11 years since then, I decided on the spot in the bookstore to do the legwork Hollywood hadn’t done and learn everything I could about Jeffrey Dahmer—and especially his time in Miami.

WOULD THE OPENING OF THE FILES HELP SOLVE THE CASE?

IN 1996, AT THE REQUEST OF NEWS ORGANIZATIONS but over the bitterest objections of Hollywood Police and the Walsh family, a judge ruled that Florida law required that the long-unsolved murder case file of Adam Walsh, killed in 1981, must be made public.

In advance of the exposure of the files, charges flew:

The city of Hollywood and its police department lacked the experience to conduct an investigation of this magnitude.

—Richard Witt, in 1996 the chief of police, Hollywood, Florida

Now, details previously known only to the police and the killer will be known to all—making it almost impossible to find out who the real murderer is.

—John Walsh

Introduction

DAHMER, JEFFREY—SERIAL KILLER WHO LIVED IN THE MIAMI AREA at the time Adam Walsh was abducted.

In 1994, a Hollywood, Florida cold case detective reviewing the never-solved Adam Walsh murder case of 1981 wrote that in a seven-page master summary of 70-plus people who over the years had been briefly suspected of the crime or who had given information regarding it. His purpose was to organize the huge, rambling case file and see if in the passage of time some neglected lead might leap off the page, requiring a fresh look.

The case was the largest in the history of the low-rise seaside city of Hollywood, and a festering sore besides because police, despite monumental work, had never made an arrest. It was all the more notorious because a child’s severed head had horrifically been found and identified as Adam, and the boy’s father, John Walsh, afterwards had crusaded to change American laws and awareness regarding missing children and then had become the long-running host of a hyper-aggressive crime-fighting television show, America’s Most Wanted.

Unfortunately, the Dahmer line the detective wrote got no rise out of him.

As Hollywood Police had quickly learned after Dahmer’s capture in Milwaukee in 1991, he’d lived and worked about 15 minutes by car from where six-year-old Adam was last seen alive, the toy department of Sears in the Hollywood Mall, where his mother had left him alone on a summer Monday around noon for no more than 5-10 minutes, she said. Although Hollywood Police never found anyone who remembered Dahmer in South Florida, Dahmer himself had admitted being here then. He even said later he remembered seeing the story on the news. But he denied killing Adam—so convincingly that the cold case detective hardly bothered to retrace the previous investigation. To the original lead detective, Dahmer said that summer he didn’t have a vehicle—essential for a kidnapping. He wasn’t attracted to children that young. He didn’t know where the Hollywood Mall was. He was busy working 12-hour days every weekday and most weekends. Besides, he’d already admitted to more murders than Milwaukee police had evidence of, so why would he lie about this one? Dahmer looked him straight in the eye when he denied it, the detective said—and he believed him.

Yet two separate witnesses had come forward to Hollywood Police within days of when Dahmer was arrested and his photo was all over the news. They both reported encountering Dahmer at Hollywood Mall that day 10 years earlier when Adam disappeared.

That’s not all. Within days of the original event, both witnesses initially had told Hollywood police what they’d seen—without knowing Dahmer’s name. Through the media, the police had asked for anyone with information to come forward. A flood of tips ensued. But in that flood their statements—and as it much later turned out, potentially crucial statements of others too—had been lost, ignored, or filtered out before they reached detectives.

One witness said that Dahmer, drunk, disheveled, menacing and hovering, tried to pick him up. When the witness refused, Dahmer shot him an evil stare, then stormed away. Scared but expecting Dahmer would approach someone else, who’d need help, he followed Dahmer at a safe distance through the mall, into Sears, then into its toy department.

The other witness saw Dahmer in the parking lot outside Sears grab a struggling, protesting child he thought was Adam and hurriedly throw him like a sack of potatoes into a blue van that then screeched away. That witness stood shocked, he’d never seen anything like that before. How could anyone do that to a small child?

Another witness, who was initially believed, had also described Adam’s kidnapper stealing him into a blue van that sped away. For a month, the blue van was Hollywood’s best lead.

But Hollywood Police were never bowled over by the Dahmer witnesses. Although Dahmer had volunteered the names of the places where he’d worked and lived in nearby North Miami Beach, both establishments were gone by 1991. He left no police records—that is, that the Hollywood detectives found. Without supporting witnesses or records, and a suspect’s denial, how could a murder case be made?

On the other hand, Jeffrey Dahmer was a noted convincing liar, especially to law enforcement. He severed his victims’ heads—and there was a severed head in this case. He’d already killed his first victim (by his count) and severed his head in 1978, three years before Adam disappeared. Plus, all the murders he admitted to were in states that didn’t have the death penalty. Florida famously did and still does. He also had a conviction for masturbating in a public place in front of two 12-year-olds and another for indecent exposure, and he admitted to such behavior often.

Hollywood Police didn’t interview Dahmer until a year after his Milwaukee arrest and then only after John Walsh insisted. In a Wisconsin prison, the lead detective spent just an hour with Dahmer. When he returned to Florida, he convinced Walsh that Dahmer was innocent.

Dahmer was murdered in prison two years later. Had Hollywood done as much as I did, considering my handicap of arriving 11 years after them, they would have had a chance to try Dahmer for Adam’s murder. Now it is too late. We can only speculate whether a jury would have sent Dahmer to Florida’s electric chair, his richly deserved fate. Then we would have had a legal conclusion instead of a vigilante lynching by a prison inmate.

One item Hollywood police never found was Dahmer’s name on a Miami police report 20 days before Adam disappeared. He reported a dead homeless man, who’d already turned blue, lying next to a dumpster—a dumpster Dahmer was seen eating out of about a week before. A few feet away was an electric meter room where the dead man apparently had slept—and afterward maybe also Dahmer, then homeless himself. He said he’d stepped over the dead man for days—although it was more likely he’d just dragged him out of the meter room, because the dumpster was in a well-trafficked alley, behind a pizza shop.

In the next 20 days, with the help of his new employer—whom police also never bothered to find—Dahmer apparently rented his motel-apartment room. The last time he’d lived alone in his own place, three years earlier at home in Ohio after both his parents had briefly abandoned him, he’d picked up a hitchhiker, then killed and dismembered him.

They also never found a number of supporting witnesses who had seen Dahmer’s evil eye stare exactly as the mall witness reported describing it.

One was the man who probably knew Dahmer best, his roommate on a U.S. Army base in Germany, who immediately recognized his banal pickup line to the witness. He also thought Dahmer possibly had killed a few times in Germany—German polizei had later suspected him of serial murders of women, although Dahmer admitted killing only men. The roommate had found blood- and mucus-covered buck knives in his room, and once Dahmer returned wearing blood-encrusted clothes after a night out.

He also knew that Army M.P.s had arrested Dahmer a few times for masturbating in front of German children in a local park, although they never entered charges and had merely brought him back to his room, with a brief explanation.

An Army nurse who had taught him anatomy also had seen Dahmer’s evil eyes. She thought he might have been a serial rapist. When both she and Dahmer were on the base in Germany, on three occasions badly sodomized men were rushed to her hospital, one close to death.

For his alcoholism, the Army kicked out Dahmer early—dumped him back home on an unsuspecting America, really—but without a dishonorable discharge to blot his record. From Germany he came to Miami. His Miami employer, who also saw his evil eye, said Dahmer would occasionally come to work, weekdays in the mid-morning, drunk and disheveled and he’d send him home. He also disputed Dahmer’s statement about his hours; they were only part-time, weekdays only. As well he contradicted Dahmer regarding his hair length. One of the mall witnesses insisted to the detective it was long, Dahmer said it wasn’t, and the detective believed Dahmer, reasoning that he’d recently left the military, therefore it couldn’t have been long. But the employer said it was long. So did the bunkmate, who saw Dahmer on his last day in the Army.

The police didn’t know that at Dahmer’s place of work, or its nearby sister store, was an unmarked blue pizza delivery van, easily accessible to employees, that often disappeared for hours and even days without documentation or consequences.

Even when I told the cold case detective most of this information in 2002, he still wasn’t much interested. After I broke the story in a newspaper and on television in 2007 and then the national media picked it up, Hollywood police claimed they’d since re-interviewed the two mall witnesses—but it wasn’t true; they hadn’t done even that. John Walsh’s reaction was inconsistent. Initially he said on camera that the local state attorney needed to examine the new evidence. But days later his show issued a statement that he trusted the police’s word that they had done a full investigation of my work and correctly dismissed it.

This although Walsh had once said the Hollywood Police in this case was guilty of incredible incompetence, and his lawyer suggested they were the biggest bunch of bungling idiots since the Keystone Kops.

This was the same Hollywood police force that at a dramatic late Friday-night press conference, two years after the murder, had announced they’d solved the crime: a Jacksonville drifter named Ottis Toole had confessed. The police chief claimed that he knew things that only the slayer could have known. Everything he’d told them had checked out, said an interviewing detective from Jacksonville.

Actually, Toole was a serial false-confessor who Hollywood and Jacksonville detectives needed to guide with the facts during repeated grillings over a period of days. On his own he got the simplest of facts ridiculously wrong—beginning with the statement that the child was wearing mittens—in South Florida—explained only by his thinking that the kidnapping took place in January, not July. After luring the child into his car on the premise of candy and toys inside, he hit the power door lock button to ensure that the child couldn’t easily escape—except that his car was discovered not to have power door locks. He also initially blamed the murder on his drifter-partner—until the partner was proven to be in jail in another state that day.

As shown in the transcripts, released 13 years later, when it became clear Toole needed help, the detectives dropped him obvious hints, showed him photos of the case, and gave him heavily weighted multiple-choices—which he still didn’t always answer correctly. Step by step they unfolded the entire case. But as the process went on, he repeatedly tried to recant. That’s when the detectives double-teamed him into continuing, hoping he’d eventually produce at least a single relevant true fact on his own. He never did.

To Hollywood’s further embarrassment, before the press conference they hadn’t conferred with the state attorney, who the next Monday refused to accept the case without corroboration. Detectives wasted months trying to establish that on the day Adam disappeared, Toole had been at least in the same county. In fact, they couldn’t prove where he was that day, and never established he’d ever been in the county. Meanwhile, largely depending on whether the Jacksonville detective was in the room, Toole recanted—and re-confessed—and re-recanted over and over.

All of this could have been avoided because it was obvious at the start. Toole and his partner Henry Lee Lucas were already in a crazy competition to admit to the most killings—hundreds, between them, suggesting, had their statements been true, they were the most sociopathic killing machines in the history of police work. Meanwhile, less-than-skeptical detectives from all around the country embraced them to clear out their unsolved cases. They similarly told the pair their facts and accepted their confessions. The game finally ended when a Texas prosecutor timelined their claimed murders and realized they couldn’t have been in distant states at nearly the same times.

Even before Toole’s confession, Hollywood police already had wasted more months’ effort trying to bully the Walsh family live-in nanny into confessing. Although his circumstances were irregular he didn’t come close to the criminal profile of someone who would have murdered a child and severed his head. In truth he was anything but a criminal.

Years later, John Walsh blamed Hollywood police for trying too hard to solve the crime by forcing the facts. He called the investigation into the live-in nanny an easy out for the cops, a dead-end lead and their first big mistake. Reve added, It’s almost like they’re trying to frame him. The detectives are getting pressure from the top to solve this case.

John also said for publication that Toole’s confession was beyond contempt. But four years later in 1996, just before Adam’s police case file up to that point was made public, Walsh decided, after all, that Toole most likely was Adam’s killer. By then even the Hollywood Police had long given up thinking he had committed the murder.

Since then, Walsh has continued to say that Toole killed his son, even after, in summer 2007, the ABC News show Primetime revealed that inside the electric meter room behind the sub shop where Dahmer worked a crime scene investigator had discovered a pattern of blood spatter she thought indicated a homicide, and a rusty axe and sledgehammer next to it. Dahmer had admitted using a sledgehammer on a victim before 1981, and the axe was no less grotesquely suggestive. Before broadcast, ABC had offered to present Walsh its facts, but Walsh declined and as well refused their invitation of an interview. Instead he sent an ex-cop who insisted, still, that Toole killed Adam, and promised a presentation of new evidence he’d found which America’s Most Wanted would air within a month. It didn’t.

As the chief of Hollywood police in October 1983 had announced at a surprise press conference that the case was solved, Toole killed Adam Walsh, a new chief in December 2008 did the same. Live on cable news, the Walshes were present, teary, and grateful for this day of closure, and national media followed in agreement.

But in 2008 Chief Chadwick E. Wagner offered no new evidence and certainly no smoking gun. If you’re looking for that magic wand or that hidden document that just appeared, Wagner answered a reporter’s question, it’s not there.

Case now officially closed, the police offered to media CD-ROM copies of the complete case file. (After the 1996 court-ordered opening of the file, the police had denied all public record requests to see material they’d generated since then, and no one had again challenged them in court.)

As it turned out, Wagner was wrong. In the newly released part of the case file, police did have the smoking gun evidence that solved the case.

Only he didn’t realize it.

The police had had it since 1996. Worse, it had been offered to them in the first week or weeks of the case, in 1981. They hadn’t taken it. Had they, the case would have been solved in 1991, correctly, not in 2008, wrongly.

That evidence proved the case against Jeffrey Dahmer.

1

The Fledgling Serial Killer

JULY 1991

THERE’S A FUCKING HEAD IN THE REFRIGERATOR!

Whether or not that was shrieked by a Milwaukee police officer first on the scene in Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment—a Milwaukee Journal reporter wrote it, though not in the newspaper—there was a fucking head in Dahmer’s refrigerator. It was not alone, either. Inside the rooms, as best as such things can be hidden, the police as they searched through the overnight found ten more: three in the freestanding freezer, two on a shelf in the hall closet, two in a computer box, and three more in a filing cabinet. Four still had flesh remaining on the skulls. Some were painted gray. Police also found a collection of detached male—yes, private parts.

Being discovered by law enforcement with 11 severed heads on your premises—especially considering you live alone—places you in one of the more compromising positions imaginable. So Jeffrey Dahmer, hardly a dummy and likely a genius, on the spot changed life strategies: the lonely serial killer became a serial talker to a rapt audience of detectives.

Although the cops searched Dahmer’s apartment without his consent or with a search warrant, Dahmer’s nightmarish confessions eliminated the similarly nightmarish possibility that everything the cops found in his apartment could have been tossed out in court as illegally obtained. So maybe he wasn’t so smart after all.

He admitted seventeen murders, total, including some for which there was no evidence in his apartment. Of the remainder, the one that stood out was the one he claimed was his first, in the Ohio township rancher house on a country road where he’d grown up. Why did he volunteer it? Maybe he wanted to come completely clean, as he claimed. Or maybe he figured that the cops in his hometown would search missing-persons records and discover it themselves.

Dahmer was captured in 1991. The Ohio murder was thirteen years earlier, in 1978.

He told Milwaukee detectives he couldn’t remember the victim’s name. It didn’t really matter to him, so he hadn’t committed it to memory. They were the same age. He’d met him in an Akron bar, brought him home, and they’d had sex. Days later, when the Summit County, Ohio, Sheriff’s Department did search its records and showed Dahmer a photo, he said he recognized him. He even recalled his name as Steve.

Steven Mark Hicks, the Ohio detective told him.

Although they hadn’t known each other, both boys had just graduated rival high schools—Revere for Dahmer, Coventry for Hicks—in the same county, which includes Akron. It was a Sunday—June 18, 1978.

Dahmer then changed his story. No, he didn’t find Steve in a bar. Instead, it was late that afternoon, around five, he was driving his father’s Oldsmobile back from a bar where he’d been drinking, and he saw Steve hitchhiking in front of the Bath Township Police Department, at the intersection of Cleveland-Massillon Road and West Bath Road, about a mile from the Dahmers’ house. It was a warm day and the hitchhiker was shirtless.

For the previous two years, Dahmer had been fantasizing about meeting a good-looking hitchhiker and sexually enjoying him, he said. This was his chance.

Jeff passed him in the car then stopped. Should he do it? Nobody was home, his father had separated from the family and was living in a motel, and his mother had taken his little brother and left for Wisconsin about a week before, he said. Steve said he’d been to a rock concert. When Jeff asked if he could buy some pot from him, Hicks agreed to go to Dahmer’s house, where they’d smoke, drink some beer, and listen to music.

He realized Steve wasn’t gay, and no, they didn’t have sex.

After a few friendly intoxicants in his bedroom while music played, Steve wanted to get back on his way, but Jeff wanted him to stay longer. Desperately. They fought, with their fists—until Jeff lifted a barbell rod and smacked Steve in the back of the head. Then he used it to strangle him to death.

You never forget your first kill, he said.

That’s assuming, of course, it was his first kill, for which we only have the word of Jeffrey Dahmer. At first he’d claimed he’d met his victim in an Akron bar. Should law enforcement have taken Dahmer’s word on anything that couldn’t be proved by physical evidence or what someone else said?

Whether or not it was his first, Dahmer still had to dispose of the body. Later that night, with Steve already late for both his family and his friends, Dahmer dragged him into the gravel crawl space under his house. At 5’11, 160, Steve was only slightly smaller than himself. Dahmer masturbated over him. Upstairs, unable to sleep, he decided to get rid of the evidence.

The next day he bought a hunting knife, and waited until that night to slit open Steve’s belly. Seeing its viscera, he masturbated again. He cut off one arm then created other pieces. He severed his head. Bagged each piece. Triple-bagged it in large plastic trash bags, he said. He loaded the bags in the back of the Olds then at three A.M. drove back roads with the idea of going to a ravine ten miles away, where he was going to toss them.

Halfway, he said, a police car pulled him over, suspecting him of DUI because he’d crossed the median. The cop called for backup and administered a drunk test—which he passed. One cop shined his flashlight into his car and saw the bags.

What’s this stuff?

Just garbage, Dahmer answered. He said he’d meant to take it to the dump earlier. And they believe it, even though there’s a smell, Dahmer told the homicide cops in 1991. They gave him a ticket.

He returned home, abandoning his plan. He put the bags back in the crawl space, except for the head, which he took to the bathroom, washed on the floor, and then masturbated over. Then he put it back with the rest of the body. The next morning he placed the bags outside in a ten-foot long buried drainage pipe, smashed down the front of the pipe, and left them there.

In another version he said he buried the bags in his wooded backyard.

Six days after the murder, Steve’s mother, Martha, filed a missing-persons report with the Summit County Sheriff. He had long brown hair, and she’d last seen him wearing blue jeans and blue tennis shoes. The Sunday before, his brother had dropped him off near their home so he could hitchhike about 20 miles to Chippewa Lake, which had a wooden roller coaster, where he spent the day with friends. A logical route to there went through Bath. Although Martha bugged detectives for years, and the family offered a reward for information, until 1991 nobody had reported anything.

Nature or nurture? Was Jeffrey Dahmer born a killer, or did his environment shape him toward who he became? The few known details of his home life paint a bleak picture. In his initial confession to Milwaukee police, he said his parents were constantly at each other’s throats. His Army roommate, who knew him as a 21-year-old, said he couldn’t stand to talk about his mother, and could barely manage to talk about his father. I don’t have a mother and my father is a bastard, he once said to him. Much of his family story comes from his father, Lionel Dahmer, a Ph.D. chemist who wrote a book. Unsurprisingly, considering their divorce, Lionel speaks unkindly of Jeff’s mother, Joyce Flint Dahmer. Lionel’s own sins, he wrote, were largely of omission, failing to connect with his son and his wife or recognize the evil his eldest became capable of.

Lionel described arguments with Joyce that turned physical: On some occasions, when I would fight back vigorously, [she] would seize a kitchen knife and make jabbing motions. Several times the police had to break up arguments, said a neighbor, mother of four, child playmates of the eventual killer. At the time I knew him, there was something devastating going on in his life, and there wasn’t anybody there to help him. I feel bad about that. Another neighbor said, He always seemed to be alone. A third neighbor described Joyce as a very hyper person.

Days after Lionel appeared on Dateline NBC to promote his book—and Stone Phillips had blindsided her on camera with Lionel’s published quotes about what he said was her postpartum depression after having Jeffrey—Joyce attempted suicide, by pills and gas from her kitchen oven. On a handwritten will dated two years earlier, wrote the Fresno Bee, she added a note that descended into illegibility: It’s been a lonely life—especially today. Also, she wrote, since the beginning of her marriage, Lionel has physically and mentally abused me. Now he [is] reaping financing [sic] rewards for continuing to do so. He is evil inconade [sic] and is the real monster.

Jeff and his mom largely lost contact with each other between 1978 and March 1991, when she called him. In the next four months—was it coincidental?—he killed at least eight people. In prison, Jeff seemed to ask for forgiveness. Mom, you must hate me, he told her during a visit. She didn’t, though she was horrified by his crimes. When I think of what [Jeff] did, I stop breathing, she told a Milwaukee newspaper writer she trusted. Another time, to the same reporter, in what must have been at least an attempt at a joke, she said she was considering writing her own book: What To Do If You Ever Become A Serial Killer’s Mother.

In Lionel’s family biography, when Jeff was small, almost every week seemed to bring another round of illness. He often contracted ear and throat infections that would keep him crying through the night. Over and over, he was taken to the university clinic for injections, and after a time, his little buttocks were covered with injection lumps, and he began to lash out at the nurses and doctors who labored to treat him. At four, he needed surgery for a double hernia. When he awoke from sedation, in pain, he asked his mother if the doctors had removed his penis.

That same year Jeff first became fascinated with dead animals. To know where this is going, you don’t need a degree in child psychiatry. There had been a terrible smell under the house. Lionel found the source—rodents killed and picked clean by other wild animals. After he collected them into a bucket for disposal, Jeff stuck his hand into it, to play with the bones.

At age six, Jeff broke several windows of an abandoned building. When Lionel took him fishing, he seemed captivated by fish entrails. Games Jeff played with other children involved stalking and concealment. His first grade teacher noticed he was shy, reclusive, unable to communicate with other children, and profoundly unhappy.

In third grade, Jeff killed his first animals. He caught tadpoles and brought them as a gift for a favorite teacher. The teacher gave them to another classmate, and after he showed them to Jeff, in disappointment Jeff later snuck into his classmate’s garage and dumped motor oil in their water.

According to Lionel, Jeff was molested at age eight by an older boy in the Bath neighborhood where they’d just moved. In 1991, Jeff vehemently denied it to police.

After age ten Jeff’s posture grew rigid, especially when others approached him. He preferred to be alone in his room or to blankly watch television. By early high school, undetected by his parents, he began drinking heavily and smoking pot. A neighbor perceived his budding homosexuality and told her child to stop associating with him.

On his bicycle, carrying a supply of plastic garbage bags, Jeff collected road kill—mainly dogs and foxes. After cutting into them to